1945's ultra-low-budget film noir Detour is considered in some circles to be the grandfather of the independent film. It is the epitome of bargain-basement filmmaking: it was shot in six days using only six indoor sets, many of the scenes take place in the front seats of cars with crappy rear projection attempting to convince us that they are really driving, and heavy fog rolls into the New York "city" scenes to convince us that we aren't actually on a soundstage. In addition to its bargain sets, we get bargain actors: Tom Neal, who plays the doomed hero Al Roberts, is anything but heroic; out of the hundreds of film noir dupes who run their petty lives out in front of us, he seems to deserve his fate the most because he's the whiniest, seemingly incapable of emotion other than petulance (Neal the actor was as doomed as his character: he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of one of his wives). Ann Savage, who plays Vera, the most blatantly evil of film noir's femmes fatales, barks out her lines in a way that makes the now-tame 1940s dialog sound like the worst gutter talk; we wonder if she would kiss her mother with that mouth, then we wonder if someone so nasty could have had a mother.

The film is full of things that make you want to dislike it. The terrible sets, the hamfisted acting, the overpoweringly annoying narration in which Neal begs us to believe that he's not really a bad guy. Why, then, is it consistently ranked as one of the best films noirs? Why is it in the National Film Registry? Why did I like it so much? Perhaps it's because, under its pauperism, or perhaps because of it, it's a pure example of a strong theme in film noir: the Cruel Hand of Fate, which destroys good people when they slip a little. More exactly, it reveals the masochistic strain in film noir characters, who fume bitterly about their bad luck without ever taking responsibility for their actions. In this film, we are given a completely unapologetic femme fatale, stripped of any self-explanation, and a completely spineless doomed hero, who really, if you pay attention, deserves, even asks for, what he gets.

Neal plays Al Roberts, a small-time piano player with a little bit of talent but no luck in finding a steady job. He plays piano in a dive bar where his girlfriend Sue (Chandra Drake) sings. He thinks they're in love, but we have to take his word for it, because she quickly ditches him to run off to Hollywood to become a star. He stays; why, we can't tell, because there's nothing keeping him in New York. After he receives a $10 tip from a patron, though, he comes to his senses: money is just "a piece of paper crawling with germs," and he should forget about trying to make any more in New York and join the love of his life. Because he doesn't have much of the paper crawling with germs, he hitchhikes.

He is picked up by a man named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), a loud and self-congratulatory gambler who has deep scratches in his hand, left there by a female hitchhiker who wouldn't let him grope her. Along the way, Haskell dies of a heart attack while Al is driving (Al doesn't realize this, despite the heavy-handed foreshadowing in which Haskell is constantly asking him to get his pills out of the glove box). When Al stops the car and opens Haskell's door, the body falls and hits a rock. Instead of waiting around and telling the police what happened, he hides the body, steals Haskell's wallet and identification, and drives off into the sunset, all the while complaining bitterly that fate has dealt him a bad hand. Fate isn't nearly done with him.

Stupidly, he picks up a female hitchhiker, Vera (Ann Savage), who pretends to sleep for a few miles until she sits bolt upright and demands to know where he has hidden the body. She was the woman who gave Haskell his scratches. She doesn't want to hear Al's story, and she blackmails him into driving her to Los Angeles, where she comes up with the idea of forcing Al to pose as Haskell in a bid to get control of his estranged and dying father's fortune. The pair sit in a hotel room, drinking and waiting for the old man to die, Al too shell-shocked by fate to do anything but wait. The Cruel Hand of Fate rears its ugly head again, though, as it tends to do for people who consider themselves marked for destruction, and any chance of escape is gone.

Al's behavior, despite his voice-over protestations to the contrary, is masochistic. He invites chaos. He didn't have to hide Haskell's body, but perhaps the thought of all that money in his wallet helped convince him that the cops wouldn't believe his story. He doesn't have to stay with Vera: it's not like anyone knows him in the West, and all she could give to the police would be his physical description, good for nothing in a city as big as Los Angeles. But he's convinced that he's doomed from before the movie starts. Everything is "tough luck" and "hard luck." He claims that "That's life: whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you." He warns us that "Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all." Funny, though, that it puts the finger on those who court it the most. Al Roberts, of all the film noir saps in the canon, seems to want it most of all.